Comment by unshavedyak
2 months ago
> I wrestled in high school and college, my friend. If you don't eat and work out a lot, you will lose weight, guaranteed. It's the nature of the human body; it's thermodynamics and biochemistry and hard as hell as we get older, especially when poor.
No one is questioning CICO.
The part being questioned is why it's more difficult for others. For example, my wife and I share an almost identical diet and activity level, yet i struggle to keep weight on and she struggles to keep weight off and with similar lifestyles. CICO works of course, but not only do our bodies innately do different things with the calories that they process but we simply experience that world differently.
I could drop down to unhealthily thin levels without even trying. She would be in misery even trying to maintain my weight.
This isn't an excuse necessarily. Rather just saying there's a lot of information beyond simple CICO that we're missing. Complexity in biome, addictive behaviors, and a full on assault from the food industry.
The ease i have in weight loss is not due to my own efforts. Thin people shouldn't break their arm patting themselves on the back, because imo it's usually not due to our own will.
> The part being questioned is why it's more difficult for others. For example, my wife and I share an almost identical diet and activity level, yet i struggle to keep weight on and she struggles to keep weight off and with similar lifestyles. CICO works of course, but not only do our bodies innately do different things with the calories that they process but we simply experience that world differently.
If you and your wife eat the same diet in the same quantities, it's no surprise she would have a propensity to gain weight and you wouldn't unless she's substanially larger (i.e., taller and/or heavier) than you. Women in general just burn fewer calories for similar sized vs. men. That said, this is ALL population averages. Everyone knows someone who seems to be able to eat literally anything and never gain weight... it likely is just as simple as their metabolism is such that they burn more calories than the average person. Population variation will always lead to some people with outliers both in high expenditure and low expenditure.
> it likely is just as simple as their metabolism is such that they burn more calories than the average person. Population variation will always lead to some people with outliers both in high expenditure and low expenditure.
That's the point though. I'm saying that we burn calories at different rates. We burn fat at different rates. We have different rates of addiction, cravings, etc.
Just saying CICO is the same boring and borderline inaccurate language that has led to nearly zero change in the population at large. may as well just tell them to use physics correctly to lose the weight, because it's the same effective language.
To even determine CICO is fraught with difficulty and inaccuracy in both CI and CO. You can hand make everything, weigh every ingredient, and even then you struggle to determine how much you're CO. At best you'll have an estimated CO but then what do you do when your weight isn't changing? you have to start adjusting the math because clearly you're not burning as much as you think you are.
This is made much, much worse with the fact that we don't actually burn that many calories with exercise. And even with what is burned, the rate of burn changes drastically based on your current weight and how long you've been losing weight.
The fact is, the point is, CICO ignores all the real challenges and thereby all the real problems people need to understand and face.
> The fact is, the point is, CICO ignores all the real challenges and thereby all the real problems people need to understand and face.
I think we'll have to disagree here. At the end of the day CICO is the formula. That obviously doesn't account for the human factor in regards to the adherenace rate, but it does, fully encompass the 'if you were a robot and were fully adherent how do you lose/gain weight' method.
> To even determine CICO is fraught with difficulty and inaccuracy in both CI and CO. You can hand make everything, weigh every ingredient, and even then you struggle to determine how much you're CO. At best you'll have an estimated CO but then what do you do when your weight isn't changing? you have to start adjusting the math because clearly you're not burning as much as you think you are.
I won't say it's 'easy', but it's also not particularly hard either with the multitude of widely available food databases for measuring calories in. As for calories out, it's arguably even simpler: measure your weight every day, take the average across the week, and watch your weight trend week over week. Calories out can be calculated simply by comparing calories in vs. weight lost/gained... and extrapolating. It's simple math, and very effective in my experience.
> This is made much, much worse with the fact that we don't actually burn that many calories with exercise. And even with what is burned, the rate of burn changes drastically based on your current weight and how long you've been losing weight.
Essentially irrelevant if you follow my above suggestion for how to measure calories out. It's just part of the bucket of calories burned, so as long as you're reasonably consistent with the amount of exercise you do then your averaged weight will account for any exercise based caloric expenditure.
10 replies →